I was with President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

            The month had started out warm, as fall in Washington often is, with just a hint of crispness in the air. An occasional rose still bloomed in the newly installed Rose Garden just outside the Oval Office. It had already become a favorite place for the President to hold special meetings and to take solitary walks, but that fall it didn’t provide the solace he so desperately needed. Nothing could.

            We were little more than a month into the new school year. We lived on Broad Branch Road, just over five miles from the White House, across the street from Lafayette Elementary School. It’s a community of modest two-story homes whose front yards were littered with children’s toys. In the mornings, groups of children walked to school, the girls still unaccustomed to the skirts and dresses that had replaced their summer shorts and the boys straining under shirts buttoned to the neck. Older boys, those in the sixth grade, stood at attention at street corners, their white safety belts looped over one shoulder and clasped around their waist. A silver colored pin affixed to the belt, little more than an emblem of the safety patrol, had the vague authority of a policeman. The smell of their fathers’ hair oil hung near them. When children approached, the patrol boys stood proudly at attention, scanned the traffic, and signaled them to cross.

            No one was afraid.

            Most of the families had a television. We watched Leave it to Beaver and Mister Ed, and on Sunday evenings, Bonanza and the new Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color although we could only imagine the colors over Cinderella’s castle with our black and white sets.  Mostly, though, children stayed outside after school, went to scout meetings, rode bikes. At five o’clock mothers throughout the neighborhood started calling children home for dinner. Our family had a big four chamber whistle. You could hear it from one end of the neighborhood to the other, clear and distinctive among the other family calls, a sound like a train warning.  

            There were warnings of a different kind that fall. On a tiny island 90 miles from the Florida coast events were taking place that would put our lives at risk. As the days grew cooler and shorter, tension in the White House escalated. News reports hinted at a Soviet-backed military buildup in Cuba. Still, children went to school, played, and planned what they’d wear on Halloween.

            We were happy and carefree. We didn’t know that those late October days might be our last. And it wouldn’t be just death, but every tangible expression of our lives obliterated. Dust. We were ground zero for a nuclear attack that President Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Krushchev were, it seemed, moving inextricably toward.

            Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, says that he first became enamored of photography after seeing a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. He said he realized “with amazement I have not been able to lessen since,” that he was “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.” 

            I know how Barthes must have felt. A painting of Napoleon is an accrual of impressions taken by the artist over many sittings; a photograph captures reality, or at least what we think of as reality. No photograph of Napoleon exists. But for Barthes, the next best thing to experiencing Napoleon was to experience someone who did.

            It’s in this way that I came to know John Kennedy. And it is in this way that I experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis.

            It wasn’t until 1966, however, three years after JFK’s assassination.

            I have little memory of the actual Cuban Missile Crisis. My parents’ whispered conversations and the worried talk between neighborhood mothers those October days in 1962 didn’t make sense to me until well after the crisis had passed and we regularly practiced crouching under our desks at school in case of a nuclear attack. My brother, old enough at the time to know what was happening, says the family was packed and ready to run if the Soviets attacked, as if being outside the city limits would save us.

            But in 1966 I came face-to-face with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was when we moved to a bigger house and my father began displaying photographs of the nation’s leaders that he made as a photographer for The New York Times. It was then that I began my own private relationship with the President.  And one particular photograph held me captive. It was JFK working in his office during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was my Jerome.

            Our house wasn’t decorated it was filled, stacked from floor to ceiling with photographs my father made of presidents and politicians. Running up the stairs to my room, the photographs that lined the walls demanded my attention. Lady Bird Johnson, Richard Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrapped in an American Flag, Arlington Cemetery in the snow, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson. I studied each one carefully. I knew them more intimately than I knew my own family. As a teenager I crept up the stairs late at night trying not to wake my parents. John, Bobby, Dick, Gerald, watched my tentative steps. I walked past them sleepily every morning making sure I pulled my robe tight around my waist and turned from their preying eyes.

            But, always, the pictures of John Kennedy called out to me even as I rushed past taking the steps two-by-two or shyly turning my back on them. First, I saw him as a senator, then campaigning for the presidency, his hand reaching out to a crowd that pushed toward him like a wave. The early days in the White House were there, campaign trips, a conversation with his brother outside the White House, a private moment alone.

            It was the next picture that pulled me to its center, sucked me into its dark corners and held me captive. It was as if I travelled back in time whenever I saw it, or that there was no such thing as time. I was there. The photograph was made during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  

            I saw JFK at his desk late at night, a globe illuminated to his right. He was deep in thought, the Soviet ships nearing Cuba. I was mesmerized. I sensed being with him then, hovering nearby as he read memos and wires from his advisors. I felt the enormity of the decisions he had to make. I mimicked his posture, the tilt of his head.

            And I knew what he didn’t, that 13 months later he would be dead, and when I felt he might turn his head, I looked away, sure he would see the sad truth in my eyes.

            In my world, time condensed like the pages of a history book. John Kennedy alive at the bottom of the stairs. Nearby, his brother Bobby, Attorney General, stared out a window also deep in thought. A U.S. Marshal’s helmet is in the foreground, dented and scratched where it was grazed by a bullet during the stand-off following James Merideth’s historic entrance into the University of Mississippi. Climbing higher on the stairs more photographs of JFK, his funeral, Bobby’s run for president, his funeral, and then, at the top of the stairs, the last Kennedy brother.

            People used to tell me I was lucky. But I didn’t feel lucky. I often felt overwhelmed by the photographs that lined our walls, by the people in them who lived in a kind of parallel universe that I was both immediately drawn to and repelled by.

            I don’t know why I felt this way. I know that I bring my own perspective to these photographs, and I know that it’s clouded by a father/daughter relationship. I always felt I was at once looking at my father in his photographs and being looked at by him in the same way he looked at those he photographed. He was, in that way, a presence, and I think he knew it, too. The power was intoxicating.

            I think Barthes felt the same way about photography.  Certainly not every image provokes such a roller coaster of emotions but there are some that are so full of emotion, truthful, and revealing that they become something more than what they first appear to be. That could be why I had to stop looking at the photographs that lined our walls. I needed a more distant relationship. I began imagining them as silent boarders I passed without acknowledging.

            But there were always some photographs that refuse to move to the background.     

            And that’s how I came to be with JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

(This essay is adapted from the author’s memoir about her father, photographer George Tames. Photographs, copyright, George Tames/New York Times)